


i once was lost

by Inkjade



Category: Daredevil (TV)
Genre: Angst, Avocados at Law, Because of Reasons, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/M, Fights, Foggy Nelson needs a hug, Humor, Karen Page has it all figured out, Karen Page needs a hug, M/M, Matt Murdock Needs a Hug, Stick does not need a hug, The Author Regrets Nothing, basically the emo-coaster, but much with the sexytimes, not so much with the plot, you know you're in trouble when Stick decides to help you sort out your personal life
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-29
Updated: 2016-12-29
Packaged: 2018-09-13 02:33:51
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 14,004
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9102646
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Inkjade/pseuds/Inkjade
Summary: Foggy looks up in time to see Matt’s cane go sailing across the room like a scimitar. And holy shit, the old dude catches it without batting an eyelash.“You don’t get to bench me, Stick,” Matt says, low and dangerous. “You don’t give orders in my city.”The cane goes flying back at a speed that makes it sound like a tiny jet.Or: post S2, Matt, Foggy, and Karen have to hide out for a few days because reasons (Fisk) and get some important things out in the open.





	

**Author's Note:**

> I should be working on an XMA thing (and if you’re waiting for that, I am, I swear! I just sort of got stuck and decided to write backward, which is…progress? But not exactly of the sort I can post until I connect the dots. I suck: I’m sorry.) but I needed a break, and I also needed practice writing the sexytimes, and this show is rapidly becoming my new fav, so…here? 
> 
> My self-prompt was angsty>funny>angry>sexy>sweet in 10K or less. It’s er, 14K, and who knows if I managed the to hit the other goalposts, but damn it was fun to write.
> 
> Anyway. All characters are Marvel’s, all screw-ups are mine, etc. etc. ~*MUAH*~

In the years they’d spent rooming together at Columbia, Foggy Nelson learned many things random about Matt Murdock, as one does with a person they’re forced into close quarters with and don’t, you know, actively dislike. He learned that Matt hated the smell of bananas to the point where peeling one in the room could be a passive form of revenge; that Matt could hold his whiskey to heroic lengths but not remotely his gin, to sometimes hilarious effect; that Matt slept so perfectly still it was unnerving, except when he had nightmares. Then he would twitch and mumble before gasping himself to wakefulness, fumble on clothes at whatever hour, and disappear outside for long stretches, sometimes forgetting his cane (and how even…?) but never his glasses. Foggy would lay blearily awake in his sweaty sheets, imagining him wandering in the dark, struggling with the impulse to put his own clothes on and march out to make sure Matt didn’t drop down a manhole or get flattened by a car, or whatever. At least he could bring him his damn cane.

But he didn’t, because he’d also learned that however good-humored his roomie pretended to be about being offered an arm or a hand by total strangers, about having to repeatedly ask his professors for cleaner handouts that his OCR software could actually read, about intrusive stupid questions and condescending assumptions and any of the other million annoying things that come with blindness, Matt Murdock had actually zero tolerance for being coddled. And his definition of coddling was, to put it mildly, broad. It would have covered all of Foggy’s childhood.

He never _said_ anything, of course. He’d just get this tight little smile and a few lines would form between his perfect manly eyebrows, and you’d be on his shit list for a while—an experience that involved little outright aggression, because Matt expressed anger about as often as he did any other negative emotion, which was to say he really didn’t. But that didn’t make it better. Being on Matt Murdock’s shit list was like being plunged into a minor ice age: silence coupled with the uneasy sense of big, important things moving under the surface; a cooling of several degrees…the occasional jarring separation as parts of a glacier shaved off in a process which Foggy used to know the word for but forgot after he finished that one undergrad environmental science course.

This has not changed since they graduated: it hasn’t even changed since Matt became a broke-lawyer-by-day, ass-kicking-well-dressed-super/sonar-powered—whatever, Foggy hasn’t figured out how that part works and he probably never will—anyway, _vigilante_ by night, a dude working outside the law he swore to uphold and who apparently doesn’t need friends anymore, or maybe never did at all.

“Dammit,” he breathes, and his client cuts him a sideways glance. So does Matt from where he stands by the jury box, having just delivered a closing statement Foggy probably should have listened to more closely, if the expressions on the jurors’ faces are anything to go by. Matt taps his cane gently on the floor as he takes his seat. Stupid fake cane. No wonder Matt had left it behind on his midnight post-nightmare walks. There’s a lot Foggy never paid much attention to.

In law school he actually had imagined sometimes, mostly as a mental exercise, that one day he’d be working on the other side of the courtroom from his best friend.

He’d just never imagined they wouldn’t be friends when it happened.

“Calving,” Foggy mutters on his way down the grandiose steps of the district courthouse, having managed to reduce Brandy Nordis’s sentence by five years for extenuating circumstances, which is enough of a victory to almost call it one.

“Cows or icebergs?”

“Karen! Hey! Fancy seeing you here, in…court? Uh—icebergs. I think I mean icebergs. Unless it’s another word.”

Karen is shinily gorgeous, as always, in a fluffy coat that makes her look like a runway model and a pair of glamorous heels that will get her killed if it ices up. But the hat is the exact opposite of runway: it looks like somebody working in the dark sewed patches from the ugliest of ugly sweaters into a lumpy cone. A ragged, angry pompom explodes from the top like a chthonic tribble trying to escape from the bowels of hell. Foggy can’t help but grin at it.

“That hat’s something else,” he says, and Karen huffs a laugh.

“Let’s get a drink. You feel like a drink?”

He knows that tone. “Ah, young grasshoppah,” he says, shoving his briefcase under one arm and fumbling at the buttons of his coat. “You have not yet learned the Nelson Way. Drinks after _dark_. Besides, I have to get back to the office and explain—“

“Foggy. Come on.”

He knows that tone too, and heaves a sigh. “Fine.”

Joie 56th is closest, and is as pretentious as its name suggests. “I just ordered a $20 vodka tonic,” Foggy sighs, and Karen grunts, pulling the monstrosity off her head. Her hair reaches after it in a crackle of static, a weird visual echo of the pompom explosion.

“You’re a big shot lawyer now, you can afford it,” she says.

“You obviously have no idea what my student debt looks like. Small countries don’t gross what I owe. I mean seriously, you should see—“

“Matt told me, Foggy.”

His mouth keeps making dumb sounds for another few seconds while that registers. He takes a drink, grimaces at the burn down his suddenly stupidly dry throat. “About his penchant for wearing women’s underwear in his off hours? His Star Trek action figurine collection?” Karen’s unamused face is supremely Unamused. It deserves capitals. Foggy gives it right back to her with some panic as interest. “You’ll have to be more specific, Karen, Matt and I don’t really talk so much these days.”

Karen leans in close enough that her breath, carrying the mint from her mojito, wafts across his cheek. “About his _night job,_ ” she hisses. “About that _car accident_.” She leans back. “About a lot of things, Foggy, that somebody should have told me a long time ago.”

The rest of the mojito goes down her throat. Foggy, feeling a little numb, follows her example and winces away from her death stare. It also deserves capitals. “Two more,” he says, waving at the bartender.

They stare at their napkins while the drinks are served. Foggy can feel his heart trying to stage a jailbreak out between his tonsils. Fuck that, he thinks. This is what I _wanted_. Goddamn you, Matty, even when you’re not here you’re here.

“So what do you want me to say?” he mutters when their side of the bar is uninhabited once more. “It wasn’t my secret to tell, Karen.”

“You lied for him.”

“You think I wanted—“ he meets the bartender’s eyes, lowers his voice to a hiss. “You think I wanted to do that? I hated that! I told him he needed to tell you!”

“Yeah, well, I guess he listened. Eventually. But you should have, Foggy. You both needed—crap. You two…” Karen shakes her head and takes another massive gulp of her drink. Foggy thinks back to a night at the old firm when she came in red-eyed and reeking of scotch, and wonders if he needs to be worried about her. “You two.”

“There’s no _us two_.”

“Oh, sure. That’ll fix everything.”

 “You know what? It really will. He was tired of me telling him to slow down, and I was tired of picking his ass up off the pavement and covering for it in the office. So yeah, Karen, it will.”

Yet another patented Death Stare. His mom could learn a thing or two from Karen Page. “Okay, Foggy,” she says wearily. “Whatever you say.”

He’s bracing for the zinger—parting shots after the quarry has been lulled into a false sense of complacency are Karen’s specialty—but instead she slaps three twenties on the bar and leaves him and the rest of her mojito sitting there. He watches her struggle into her coat and The Hat (also deserving of capitals, because really, that pompom came straight out of _The Dunwich Horror_ ) in silence. Then he mutters “fuck”, tosses another sixty on the bar, and scrambles out after her, because he is an idiot who idiots and cannot let go of things that need letting go of.

She’s waiting for him just around the corner, a little self-satisfied quirk on her mouth not doing much to soften the no-bullshit look in her eyes.

Oh. That was _sneaky_.

“Goddammit Karen,” Foggy sighs. “I liked your old zingers better.”

“Come on, Foggy. There’s something you need to see.”

 

* * *

 

Stick makes his move on a Friday five weeks after they bury Electra.

Matt has been waiting for him to go, wanting it and not wanting it; wanting to get it over with, because if there is any constant this old man can be counted on to keep constant it’s this: Stick leaves. At first he thought it was because the Hand might not be done with Hell’s Kitchen. Then he decided Stick was probably due a rest, even if he was incapable of admitting it. (Matt’s almost half a century younger than Stick, and he is exhausted.) But by the end of the first week, with the old man vanishing and reappearing at unpredictable intervals—sometimes in his apartment with medicine or information, sometimes in the middle of a rooftop fight, twice, bewilderingly, with breakfast—by the time seven days have passed, Matt can admit to himself that he has no idea what Stick is doing or why.

He doesn’t ask, of course. He learned how pointless that was before he was ten years old.

Instead they shuffle around one another like a pair of dogs that haven’t yet decided to fight. Matt catches up on sleep: he’s only got a few cases, and for the first time since he was nine and newly blind, he doesn’t have much he has to be doing during his waking hours. Being awake when he can’t be in the suit is…

Well. It’s better to give his body a rest.

And when he’s not sleeping or working, he drives himself harder, because that makes sleep easier.

“Come with me,” Stick says, having picked his locks again.

Matt lifts his head from the pillow. Stick’s pulse is higher tonight, as though he took the stairs at a run, except Matt knows he didn’t, and also that it would take a hell of a lot more than a flight of stairs to give Stick’s heart a workout. He smells of car exhaust and dust and Thai food, and faintly of sweat. There’s a bruise hiding under his left pant leg: the flesh is flush with blood, throbbing in Matt’s senses like a small second heart under the skin. His feet set a little less lightly than they usually do on Matt’s floors. Two buildings over Ms. Latham is digging through dresser drawers with frantic haste and crying under her breath. Her husband is pacing and muttering half a block away. She’s probably headed back to rehab.

The hollow carved into his chest fills fleetingly with curiosity. “Where are we supposed to be going.”

“You’ll see. Get your ass up, kid, quit feeling sorry for yourself.”

God, that brings back memories. He’s out of bed almost before he knows he’s going to move: Stick has that effect. He stumbles toward the living room and Stick shakes his head, a faint rush of air against his jaw, the whisper-rustle of that cornsilk-fine hair moving. Matt stops.

“Street clothes, Matty.”

Fine. He frowns, and picks out jeans and socks, a shirt and sweater, a heavy coat, street shoes with some tread. He hates winter in Hell’s Kitchen: he can hear the ice, and it’s oddly beautiful, a cool glossy cover over the world, but that doesn’t mean he can find his footing. He locks up and follows Stick down the stairs, incurious again and weary. He needs to wash his sheets: he can smell in them every miserable dream he’s had recently. The scent clings to his hair and skin.

A thump as a man in his fifties—just replaced the toner in the printer at his office, addicted to Percocet, too much weight on his heart and lungs, had red wine with lunch and someone who likes Chanel No. 5 the night previous—knocks Stick in the side. “Look out, shithead,” Stick advises him without slowing, and Matt, tapping his cane idly against a lamppost, feels the right corner of his mouth try to turn upward half a tick before he remembers Electra’s last gasping words on the roof and the hollow carves itself a little deeper.

 “Where,” Matt says, and Stick sighs.

“Patience, kid.”

“I’m fresh out, Stick. Where.”

“Well, shit. Dig a little deeper, Matty, or have you forgotten how?”

The hollow crackles in his chest, bleeding things best left to his nighttime job. Matt stops. A short woman with rosemary lotion on her hands and too many small dogs that shed all over her damp wool coat jostles him, starts to curse, and then notices the glasses, the cane. “Careful, sir,” she says instead. The combination of condescension and kindness twines into his jaw muscles.

Stick nudges him ungently in the arm, invariably managing to hit a bruise. “Just a little farther.”

“I’m too tired for games, Stick.”

Stick huffs. It should sound annoyed, but there’s a harshness to the air leaving his throat that sounds more like nerves, if this was anyone else, that is. His pulse has picked up again. Matt doesn’t think Stick has ever quite figured out how far his senses go, but that might be wishful thinking.

What are they into here?

“Shut up and deal,” the old man says. “Over here.” His nudge this time is firmer, providing a direction. Matt goes because even after all this time he can’t not. The city buzzes and groans around them as they turn from alley to side street to side street, dodging early Christmas shoppers with crackling bags and stray dogs and low, crunching snow banks. The sewers hiss underneath them. The Thai food smell clinging to Stick’s coat begins to overwhelm the scents of dirty snow, cars, sweat, sewage. Matt’s listening to the heavier-than-usual impact of Stick’s feet on the concrete, to his higher-than-usual pulse, worrying at these things like a toothache, which is why it takes him too long to realize he’s hearing two heartbeats he knows, smelling two sets of skin-hair-laundry detergent-soap-breath that he knows, knows all too well.

He freezes. “What the _fuck_ ,” he says, and hears, with a wrench like the slide of a knife along bone, the achingly familiar bark of Foggy’s bitter laugh.

“Figures the first time you drop the F-bomb in my presence would be now,” Foggy says.

“Matt,” Karen says simply.

For a moment all he can hear is his own heart battering against the hollow place, making a long echo. “Come on,” he growls. He’s not sure at who. His senses untangle themselves, and he realizes Stick’s heartbeat has settled back to its normal rhythm; that his feet against the pavement are no longer heavy.

Apparently he has the measure of Matt’s reach after all. Dirty trick, that.

“No,” Foggy is saying. “Seriously, in three years of law school never once did I hear the hallowed word _fuck_ leave your lips. I used to think—you know what, who the fuck cares what I used to think. I’m out. Karen, I don’t know what you were hoping for here, but—“

“Shut up, Foggy.” Karen shifts, rubs at something under her coat: Matt focuses and finds the swollen flesh on her left arm. The hollow inside his chest expands to allow something else in: it takes him a moment to identify it as rage.

“Who hurt you,” he demands. Foggy’s strides halts mid-step.

“What? Karen, what is he saying?”

Karen’s sigh is warm over the exposed skin of Matt’s face, redolent of rum and mint and the chemical signatures of stress. He stifles a brief, idiotic urge to put his fingertips to her face and feel how the wound under her coat pulls on the muscles around her eyes. “Fisk,” she says. “Well. Somebody working for Fisk.”

Foggy utters a growl. “Jesus jumping Christ, you have got to be kidding me. He’s in prison! Are you okay? What did he do to you, Karen? Are you hurt? Do you need a doctor?”

“I’m fine, Foggy.”

“He’s running the prison,” Matt murmurs. Pass a message through his lawyer, through a released inmate, through an inmate’s visiting family…it wouldn’t be a stretch. His blood’s singing at him. So is Foggy’s, though not the same song. The stress seeping from Karen’s pores has intensified. Matt grips the cane.

“Let’s take this elsewhere,” Stick suggests, and Foggy utters another bark; less laughter, more outrage.

“And who the hell are you?”

“Stick, dumbass. Wake up. You can stand here until someone working for that cueball shithead does the world a favor and airs out your brains or you can come with me and learn something. Your choice.”

On that pronouncement Stick heads further down the street, then ducks into an alley, a retreating scuff of footsteps. Karen stares at Matt: he can feel her gaze pushing at his skin, almost like a touch. Her pulse is hammering. His isn’t much better. Foggy growls another blasphemy.

“So that’s the Mr. Miyagi to your Karate Kid,” he mutters. “I’m getting a picture of your formative years, Murdock, and it’s not a pretty one.”

The sting of that shouldn’t be surprising: Foggy has always had unerring aim. Matt swallows back another _fuck_. There’s no time for this. Damn Stick. “I suggest we do as he says, unless you have a better idea. Karen, tell me everything you remember. I’ll—“

“The _hell_ you will, Matt,” Karen says tightly. Then she’s striding down the street where Stick disappeared, a retreating source of heat, her heels clacking hard enough to echo off the brick walls.

Leaving him mute, and with Foggy.

“Well fine, I guess we’re following _that_ fuckstick,” his best ( _ex, ex, ex best_ ) friend says, and Matt doesn’t have a chance to choke back the startled yelp of laughter that leaps out of him, because he had no idea it was coming. He catches the fading echo in a palm, wipes it across his mouth as though that can rid him of the bittersweet taste. _Fuckstick_. He will never get that out of his head. It’s a classic Foggy Nelson insult: layered, specific, and hilarious.

The hollow inside him shifts, cutting open things that can’t be stitched back together.

“Come on,” he rasps, too close to the Devil’s low growl, and flees before he can hear any more of Foggy’s heart beating _no, no, never again, that’s over and I’m relieved_.

 

* * *

 

“You three need to lay low for a while,” Fuckstick says. It’s clear from the way Matt’s head jerks in the old dude’s direction that this was not previously discussed in whatever clandestine ninja meeting of the crazy Matt has going with this guy.

This guy who looks like a really pissed-off strip of turkey jerky and glares like he can both see people and possibly burn holes through them with his eyes.

Foggy almost says the bit about turkey jerky out loud, because it is disturbingly accurate, but prudence and the memory of Matt’s astonished laughter a few minutes ago make him clench his teeth over it. That laugh had felt like a kick in the balls and a hug all at the same time, and he can’t decide which part of that is worse.

They are standing around each other like the world’s saddest superhero conference, in a basement—something. Not apartment, that’s for sure. It looks like it wants to be a lair but never got much beyond creepy library. There are rooms, and really shabby furniture, and lots of musty books, and the dim lighting that is thematically appropriate to long sweaty evenings spent plotting the destruction of the Shanolin Order.

“No way, Stick,” Matt says, all clenched jaw and folded arms and rippling biceps that are somehow visible even through the sleeves of his coat. Vigilante chic. He blends in nicely here. Matt gets a whack in the knee from the old dude’s cane for that remark. It doesn’t sound like a gentle whack. It’s also spectacularly accurate. Foggy narrows his eyes at the colorless pair in the dude’s head and wonders if this one can also see air and smell lies.

“Shut up, Matty, and hear me out. Take a seat.”

_Matty_. Jesus. Foggy’s formative years comment was mostly a joke. How much time did these two spend together when Matt was a kid?

“I don’t think so.”

Karen, who until now has been silently watching this trainwreck with a look on her face like she’s mentally composing her next big story—BLIND NINJA BITCHFEST IN HELL’S KITCHEN, maybe—tosses her hands in the air, which draws Matt’s attention.

“Lovely,” she snaps. “Can you guys get the dick-measuring out of the way, please, so we can have a real conversation? I’m tired. I thought you _worked together_. And Mr. Sota, when we spoke last night I was under the impression you were going to make some reasonable, feasible suggestions, not this hand-wavey—”

“Last _night_?” Matt echoes, at the same time that Foggy blurts “Mr. _Sota_? Oh come on!”

It takes him a minute to realize everyone’s staring at him, even the two blind guys.

“It’s an alias, Foggy,” Matt says wearily, which, yeah, no shit. He’s entirely done with the you-can’t-possibly-understand-my-world thing that Matt Murdock has thrown in his face so often in the last year.

“Sota means _big stick_ ,” Foggy says. “In _Punjabi_.”

 Matt draws in an audible and slightly shivery breath.

Fuckstick just snorts, a sound which should not be able to convey as much scorn as it does. Or any at all, considering the guy chose an alias that basically boils down to _giant penis_. “What,” Foggy says, folding his arms, “were _enormous rod_ and _lengthy bludgeon_ taken, old dude? _Giant wand_? Didn’t feel like being _Mr. Mighty Staff_? I guess _Mr. Twig_ was probably out for obvious reasons.”

“Foggy…please stop talking.” Matt pinches the bridge of his nose under the glasses like he’s getting a headache, but there’s a twitch at the corner of his mouth that tells Foggy he’s in all likelihood trying to swallow another one of those unscripted yips of laughter. Matt hates going off-script. Foggy hates that he knows this: hates that he knows Matt Murdock so well the slightest shift in his expression is a fifty-page deposition transcript with footnotes.

“No, I don’t think I will, Matt! Because Karen’s hurt! Because I haven’t heard a word from you in _six weeks_ and now I’m supposed to lie with y—lay low with y—argh, whatever! Because we’re standing here in the reject room of basically every cheesy martial arts movie made before 1985 getting advice from a guy who looks like a freeze-dried tofurky and calls himself Mr. Big Stick!” He throws his own hands up: it is sort of satisfying. “Why am I the only one who _isn’t okay with this_?”

“I’m the one who shot James Wesley,” Karen barks at them.

Matt grunts. It takes Foggy another second to process; then he opens his mouth, but nothing comes out. He shuts it again. In the silence Karen claps both hands over her mouth like she can take it back, her eyes huge. “Oh. My god. _Ungh_. I…”

She turns away, shoves her hands through her hair.  The Hat slips off her head. Foggy knows the little sound she makes this time isn’t pain: he’s heard her cry enough times to recognize it. Matt makes another soft grunt-like noise. Foggy shots him a disgusted look that is entirely wasted (or maybe it isn’t, who the hell knows) on him and tip-toes up to Karen to take one of her hands. He unclenches her fingers from around her silky hair. It takes effort. What she said is ringing through him, shaking stuff loose all over.

“I didn’t mean to just drop it on you like that,” she says hoarsely when her hand is unfolded and pressed in his. The shivering in her arm cuts right to his bones.

All this time she was carrying this. The night she came in doused in booze and shaking; the haunted look in her eyes since then. He and Matt were feuding like kids in a playground over their own drama, the city was exploding around them, Karen was holding them together as best she could, and all the time she was carrying—

Jesus. Jesus Christ.

“Well, somebody had to shut me up,” Foggy murmurs. Karen huffs and claws a furrow into his palm. He takes a breath, trying to mentally navigate the minefield before he opens his mouth. “I’m sure—I mean, I don’t know what—fuck. It’s—Karen. I know you would have had a damn good reason, is what I’m doing a terrible job of trying to say. And you know a pair of pretty good lawyers, if it comes to that, but it probably won’t and right now… Don’t tell me anything about it if you don’t want to. But I’m sorry I wasn’t there for you when you needed me to be, Karen. I’m really, really sorry about that.”

The echo of everything he never said to Matt makes him wince.

Karen tries for another laugh and doesn’t make it. She wipes at her face. Foggy pulls her into his arms, not knowing what else to do, because—fuck. He does it slowly, in case she needs to get away.

She slumps into him. There’s another one of those noises from Matt: Foggy looks over scowling, but the expression on Matt’s face kills whatever it is he was going to say. It’s cool and calm, the way Matt always is when he’s wary or thinking hard, but it’s crumbling around the edges. What’s underneath gives Foggy a pretty good idea of what little Matt Murdock must have looked like at ten years old. It hurts Foggy to look at it. It feels _wrong_ to see Matt like this, knowing Matt can’t see the look on his face (so far as he knows). It’s like stealing. Not even the face-wrecking tears Matt had been swallowing the day after Foggy found him bleeding out on his apartment floor in a mask had been this raw.

He pulls Karen in tighter and presses his face to the side of her head, utterly rattled.

“Fisk seems to have figured it out,” Stick says. “Word is he’d blamed it on one of his own, but he’s been busy lately, and somebody must have seen something. Or guessed it. He’s gunning for you three pretty hard.”

“I can take care of that, Stick,” Matt says faintly. Karen sighs. Foggy hugs her a little tighter, wanting and not wanting to weigh in on this.

“Not this time, you can’t. That cueball has linked up with some pretty heavy guns in prison.”

There’s a swoosh and a clatter: Karen jumps and pulls back with a curse. Foggy looks up in time to see Matt’s cane go sailing across the room like a scimitar. And holy shit, the old dude catches it without batting an eyelash.

“You don’t get to _bench me_ , Stick,” Matt says, low and dangerous. “You don’t give orders in my city.”

The cane goes flying back at a speed that makes it sound like a tiny jet.

Matt slaps it out of the way with a wordless snarl. His glasses glint light from the overheads. Stick folds his arms, as casual as if they’re talking about a baseball game in a bar. Foggy, on the other hand, feels anything but casual. He thought he’d seen Matt angry a few times over the years, but he’s beginning to realize he had no idea.

“I do today, kid,” the old guy says, like he has no idea he’s got his head halfway down the lion’s throat. “You are in over your damn thick head. They’re not interested in your alter ego; they’re looking for you and your friends, and they will keep shaking the trees until they find you and your friends. You can’t fight this in your fancy Kevlar underwear, not without an all-out war, which you told me _your city_ had seen enough of. You definitely can’t do it without giving away who you are, and who your friends are to you. So shut the hell up and sit it out. Give me a few days. Let me rattle some cages.”

Matt has flinched visibly at every use of the word _friends_ , and by the end of this little speech he’s moving forward, up in Stick’s face. “Woah!” Foggy hisses, because, well. Footage of the Devil of Hell’s Kitchen karate-chopping some dirty cops is one thing: his old roommate/business partner moving across twenty feet of open space like he can practically teleport is something else. Stick flicks a hand and Matt staggers backward. Matt does something with his leg and the old man stumbles sideways.

“Oh Christ,” Karen whispers, and tugs Foggy several steps away. Good thing she’s still got a brain: his seems to be floating out of the building.

“Let you take care of it, right. Like you tried to take care of _her_ , you mean? Am I going to get a visit from an assassin, Stick? Will I get a gravestone too, or will you just leave me to rot when you—like you did when you—goddamn you, you _bastard_ —”

“Stop it, you fuckheads!” Foggy cries, but if they hear him, they’re not taking orders.

They are actually fighting now. Actual ninjas are fighting. Blind, superpowered, actual ninjas are fighting in a library. Foggy can feel himself trying to mentally catalog this moment via all the old kung fu movies he watched as a kid, but it’s not possible. The only sounds for several confusing moments are harsh breathing and the smack of fists hitting home. Karen mutters a few memorable phrases. Then Stick has Matt down, bent over with his arm wrenched up and a bony-looking knee in his back, and Matt is twisting away, panting in panicked bursts. His face shines with sweat.

“That’s exactly what I’m trying to avoid, you little shit,” the old man says into Matt’s ear, and throws him flat in a quick, graceful movement. Matt’s glasses fly off his face. He utters a sharp cry. Foggy bites back an echo.

“Stay down, Matty,” Stick says. “For once in your fucking life, learn when to stay down.”

Then he moseys out of the room like he just took a nice brisk walk in the park, leaving Foggy and Karen to stare at Matt curled on his side on the floor.

 

* * *

 

It’s Karen that moves first—of course it is. She tugs her hand free of Foggy’s sweaty one, bends to pick up Matt’s glasses, and kneels next to him. Matt curls a little farther in on himself. “Here,” she says.

For a moment Matt doesn’t move, and then he raises one hand and plucks them gingerly from her fingers. He doesn’t make any attempt to put them on or roll over.

Self-disgust finally gets Foggy’s ass moving. He hovers over them both, watching Karen’s rounded shoulders as they begin to straighten under this new burden, Matt’s back as it bends farther inward. He shoves his hands in his pockets, then gets a mental picture of the three of them as if from a distance and kneels on Matt’s other side, because that brief image is enough to tell him anything else is just cowardice.

“Whose gravestone? Who died, Matty?” It comes out firm, but he didn’t mean to say _Matty_. He can see that silly nickname ripple through Matt’s spine like a blow, and just—goddammit.

“Electra,” Matt says dully.

Foggy can’t think of anything to say. He never liked Electra, and despite a garbled yelling session in a court bathroom a while back, he still has no idea how she got mixed up in this, but he knows she was a lot of somethings to Matt back in school. Maybe a lot of everything. “Shit,” he breathes.

“Hmm-mhm,” Matt replies, the saddest attempt at sarcasm Foggy has ever heard. He fumbles his glasses onto his face. “Fog. Can you, m-move back a bit, I need to—”

“ _Matthew,_ ” Foggy snaps.

“Not so much,” Karen says at the same time. She sets a hand on the back of Matt’s neck, and that’s all it takes: Matt freezes, pulls in a single, ragged gasp, and then falls completely apart.

It’s unnaturally silent. Foggy has never seen anybody cry this hard without making all the wet, undignified noises that come with this kind of crying. But Matt manages, though it looks like he’s half-strangling himself to pull it off, which is somehow the worst thing about it.

Shit shit _shit_.

“Okay,” he says, and flops over sideways so he’s right up in Matt’s space, getting an eyeful of his best frien—his ex-best fr—his fuck-it-he-doesn’t-know-what’s screwed-up, miserable face. Matt digs the heels of his hands under his eyes, trying to hide or to stop. It’s pretty hard to hug someone from this position, but Foggy does his level and awkward best. Matt is vibrating like a live wire in his arms, arching stiffly backward even as he curls tighter. The muscles under Foggy’s hands feel like rocks. “Okay, okay. Okay. Hey. Shh, Matty. Karen—”

She’s already there, wrapping her arms around Matt from the other side, stroking his hair. “Breathe, Matt,” she tells him, and Matt drags obediently at the air. This time when he breathes out his voice is behind it, and jesus. No betrayal has ever hurt him as much as listening to Matt sob in broken, breathless surges, still trying to muffle it like he thinks his grief will be held against him.

“We’ve got you, buddy,” Foggy promises.

He hopes he’s telling the truth about that.

It seems to be what Matt needs to hear, because Matt clenches his jacket in both fists and bows his hot forehead into Foggy’s collarbone. Foggy gets a better grip, feeling tears begin to trickle down his nose. He swipes the side of his face against his collar and hopes the old bastard stays gone for at least a little while. Matt could really use a break.

Matt cries until he’s limp, mostly out. He and Karen hold on as best they can.

 

* * *

 

When he wakes he doesn’t know where he is: it doesn’t feel like his apartment or the office, and the sounds and smells of the city are all muffled like there’s a layer of wet wool separating them from his senses. He flails a hand out and knocks his knuckles on wood. He has new bruises. His sinuses ache horribly. The cushions beneath him are sandpaper-scratchy, filled with dust and the faded ghosts of years of cigar smoke and incense. His heart leaps and trips in his chest.

“Calm down, Matt!”

Karen.

He can hear her pulse now, smell her shampoo, the remnants of her last drink freighted on her breath. Matt falls back and reaches reflexively for his face.

“Where are my glasses,” he says.

“Here. We didn’t think you’d want to sleep in them.” She approaches, her pulse ticking upward, and offers them. Matt stifles a sigh as he slides them on. “You know you don’t—um.”

“What.”

“Nothing. Nevermind.”

He suspects he’ll be better off not knowing how that sentence was going to end—was she going to tell him he doesn’t need them now? That he can stop pretending? Or maybe that he doesn’t have any reason to…

Oh, God. Wait. _Wesley._

“Karen, are you all right?” Matt struggles into a sitting position. It takes him a second to remember why his abdomen is so sore—Stick’s foot connecting with it repeatedly—and why his face feels raw and his sinuses feel leaden. This is much more mortifying then getting beaten to the floor by Stick, who does, in fact, beat better fighters than him to the floor pretty regularly.

His face mashed into Foggy’s warm neck; Karen’s long fingers carding through his hair. Both of them wrapped around him while he bawled like a kid.

He slumps back, scalded with shame. He doesn’t know which is worse: that he let it happen, or that the memory is as much a source of solace as humiliation. He can’t remember the last—

Anyway.

“I’m fine, it was a while ago,” Karen is saying. Her pulse is telling him the opposite. She sits, her hip pressing to his, bringing the faint lilac soap, the salt-sweet-bitter of her skin and recent tears close enough to surround him. Matt heaves a slow breath out through his stuffy nose. “I mean—well, no. I’m the reason we’re _here_ , Matt, and I’m, God, I’m so sorry for that. I should have—I don’t know. I should have warned you. I should have tried harder to warn Ben—it’s my _fault_ …” A catch in her breath. She’s trying so hard to keep it together. “I should have told you and Foggy, Matt, and I‘m sorry. I really fucked this up.”

“You won’t find me throwing stones, Karen,” Matt says. “But were you hurt? Then or yesterday? Are you all right?”

He’s terrible at this. He remembers Foggy pulling her fearlessly into his arms (then, with the same warm clench around his heart, him just moments later: no, no, he’s not dealing with this right now). Foggy has always known how to untangle the knots in people. The thought brings a familiar mournful ache and enough confusion to make his stomach flip.

“Wesley cloro’d me outside of my apartment,” Karen says hoarsely. “I woke up in a room and he, and he—dammit—and he told me I was going to work for him or he was going to hurt you and Foggy, and me too. He was…really specific. So when his phone went off I just, I picked up the gun and and he wouldn’t back down and I just— Shit! Shit! I’m sorry. Give me a second.”

Matt fumbles for her hand, speechless and furious with himself. Karen’s grip is panic-tight. She’s starting to hyperventilate. He hasn’t wished for working eyes in a while, but he’d give almost anything to be able to see her face right now.

Where the hell _was_ he? What good is he if he can’t protect his own friends?

“Can I,” he says, and stops, because they aren’t friends anymore, which was his stupid choice and his stupid fault, and he doesn’t want to hope, or to ask her for anything when she’s in this state. Hugs are out. His arms itch to pull her into one.

Her fingers tighten over his almost to the point of pain, then she gently disentangles her hand.

There’s his answer.

“Promise me you won’t pull this shit again.” Her words hum against his skin. He braces, not knowing what shit she means, but knowing he deserves the accusation. “I don’t care how you do it, Murdock, but you find a way to make this double life thing work. You don’t leave again, you don’t ditch your friends for your new life, and you _certainly_ don’t make unilateral decisions for our safety, or I swear to God the beatdown that old man gave you will look like a _massage_ compared to what I’ll do.”

It’s difficult to breathe past the lump in his throat. He fumbles a smile onto his face. “I believe you. I can’t…Karen, I can’t tell you how sorry I am. That I wasn’t there to help.”

“Be there the next time, Matt.”

“You got it,” he says and thinks wonderingly: _next time_.

He hears Foggy only as Foggy sits down across from them: his sinuses are still playing hell with his senses. “Moving forward again, are we?” Foggy says, and Matt can’t hide his wince. Karen pushes herself upright, leaving a cold expanse at his side.

“Where’s Stick,” he says. It’s the only question he dares to ask.

“You have this disturbing habit of leaving the interrogative tone out of your questions, you know,” Foggy muses. Matt tries to keep his head from tipping: he knows it’s a tell he has when he’s focusing. Foggy’s pulse is wool-muffled by the residual swelling in his sinuses, but it sounds calm enough. “He spouted some ancient wisdom, called me a fat dumbass, and took off on a mystical quest or something. Hopefully for dinner, because this place is bare, man. Quite the charmer, that dude. I can see why you keep him around.”

The idea of Foggy and Stick having an actual conversation is terrifying. “What—are you okay?”

“He didn’t mop the floor with me, if that’s what you’re asking,” Foggy mutters. Soft popping of knuckles, the slide of skin on skin. He’s flexing and releasing his right hand. “Though every time he opened his mouth I sort of wished he’d grant me the sweet relief of unconsciousness. He’s not exactly a people person. So that’s the guy that trained you when you were a kid, huh.”

“Mm.” Matt sits up a little straighter, wondering how far this line of questioning is going to go. How far he’ll let it go. But there’s no point in wondering that: they aren’t good, he let Foggy down more times than he can count and then cut him out of his life, and he couldn’t even be bothered to tell him why. No amount of explaining will change that—but right next to the awful memory of Foggy saying _I was relieved_ is the bewildering memory of Foggy saying _shh Matty it’s okay we’ve got you_. There’s no point in wondering because he knows he’ll answer anything Foggy wants to ask him. “Uh. Yeah, not long after I was taken to the orphanage. He left after—a while.”

The fight with Stick earlier is a bit of a blur, but Matt suspects he’s giving away more than he wants to with this. Karen’s tiny inhalation confirms it. He squashes the impulse to push up his glasses, to make sure they cover his eyes.

“He’s kind of a dick,” Foggy says mildly.

“You’re not wrong.”

Foggy is a warm, shifting presence across from him, pulse ticking up, then coming down as he leans back into the chair with a creak of fabric and wood.  “Matt. Matthew. This is a serious moment we’re having here now. I’m going to ask you something, and I can’t smell you lying or whatever, so I need to have your word you’re going to answer me honestly.”

“I will.” He swallows, listens to the tissues of his throat drag against each other. “Shoot.”

“Okay. Okay, here goes. What I need to know is this: who shoved the giant stick up that guy’s ass?”

Karen groans. Matt has to run that back a few times. “…What?”

“No, seriously, because I have never in my life met somebody hit so hard by the cranky stick, if you know what I mean. And I think maybe I grabbed of the wrong end of the stick here—”

“Foggy.”

“I mean, I don’t want to stick my nose in or anything, but this is a sticky situation and I feel like I don’t have the right yardstick to measure it, is what I’m saying.”

Karen shifts in a rustle of cloth and skin, her breath shivering with stifled laughter. Matt can’t decide if he’s irritated or relieved. “ _Foggy_ ,” he says, but there’s no stopping Foggy now.

“It just really sticks in my craw! Here I am working as hard as H-E-double-hockey sticks to stick up for what’s right, but Mr. Massive Branch or whatever the crap just kept sticking it to me, I wanted to stick it out but I mean he gave me more shit than you can shake a—”

It hurts to laugh. He can’t stop. Foggy just rolls right on, every iteration of _stick_ becoming less probable, until Matt is folded over his knees wheezing airlessly and Karen’s leaning against his side, shaking with the effort to be quiet.

“Oh please tell me that awful man can’t hear us from three blocks away,” she whisper-moans.

He doesn’t think so, but he’s honestly not sure. “Who cares?”

“That’s right, Matt!” Foggy hoots. “Stick it to the maaan! Stick around, you guys, I got a million of these. I spent the whole time you were sleeping thinking them up.” 

Matt has to use the arm of the couch to lever himself back upright. He rests his head against the spongy curve of the backrest, pulls his glasses off and wipes at his eyes. “I should have known that was coming.”

“True. But I think I had it right the first time with fuckstick, to be honest.”

Karen utters a high shriek of laughter. Matt feels a wide, idiot grin pushing at his facial muscles. He’s so wrung out he feels like he’s floating. “I think you did too, but don’t let that stop you.”

“When do I ever?”

“Never in my recollection,” Matt replies unthinking…and there, he’s just killed yet another moment. Foggy and Karen fall silent, and both their pulses speed up. Matt reflexively slides his glasses back onto his nose, and then thinks, fuck it. He knows his unfocused gaze makes people uncomfortable: he’s always suspected he was giving away too much in it, when he can get nothing back—that he’s speaking a language he can’t understand. Just because he can’t read visual cues doesn’t mean he’s not providing them.

Maybe that’s called for here, though. He fumbles sideways until he meets Karen’s hand and closes her fingers gently around the wire frames. “Will you hold onto these for me?”

“Or, hey, I could put them on this table that I know you know is here,” Karen says wryly.

“Oh no, Karen, you’ve ruined his symbolic gesture,” Foggy says. He’s breathing faster, muscles and tendons creaking softly. “But will we ever know: did he mean _okay you can hit me now that I’m not wearing them_ , or _look I’m not hiding anything from you_?

“Foggy,” Karen snaps.

Matt is momentarily deafened by the roar of blood flushing hot from his collar bones to his hairline. “You always did see right through me, Fog,” he says.

This also turns out to be the wrong thing to say. He knows it even before the last syllable is out of his mouth.

“No, Matt, I really, really didn’t. I think it’s safe to say I missed some pretty big stuff. And—”

“That’s my fault. I shouldn’t—”

“Let me finish, Matty.”

The _Matty_ shuts him up more effectively than a slap. He is aware that his bruised abdominals are trying to tense as though in preparation for a punch. Matt gestures with his chin: _go on_. Foggy heaves a sigh. “Some of it’s mine,” he says. “Some of it’s my fault. It took me a while and a lot of not sleeping to figure that out. There are things I have to apologize for here, and I’m going to, okay? Not to say I’m not still pissed off almost beyond expressing it, because—because Matt, I gave up everything to you except the stuff I didn’t think I ought to lay on you, and there really aren’t any words for how it feels to know you were holding back _great big fucking pieces_ of you—goddammit. No, fucking let me finish,” he snaps, though all Matt thinks he’s done is breathe.

“You were holding back all this big shit, Matt. Not just the super-senses or the crazy ninja training or your _insanely_ dangerous hobby, or even that you always knew that—when I—fuck, when I anything, probably. But. Bigger shit, Matt. You know the name of the first girl who stomped on my heart back when I was in fifth grade. You know the worst thing I’ve done. You know every crush I had in school and my stupid spider phobia and my stupid dreams, and I followed you out of an admittedly soul-suckingly awful internship into the craziest thing I’ve ever done in my life because I thought I knew _you_.”

Foggy pulls in an unsteady breath. Matt can hear the tears in his voice; he can smell them. He sinks his teeth into the inside of his cheek to stop the quiver in his chin.

“And it turned out I didn’t know you,” Foggy says, small and tired-sounding. It breaks Matt’s heart. “It turned out you didn’t want me to. So there’s that.”

“I did,” Matt says, unable to keep silent any longer. “I _do_. I wanted…” God, he needs his glasses. Instead of reaching for them he swipes at his face and tries to get his breathing under control. “I didn’t want to be…I wanted more than anything to be that guy, Foggy. The one that I got to be with you. You’re”—he pulls in a breath that is more than half sob—“You’re the only family I have. You and Karen.”

Beside him Karen shifts, gestures, and Foggy’s breath catches the way it does when he’s swallowing words. “What exactly _didn’t_ you want to be, Matt,” Karen says, picking out with devastating accuracy what it was he couldn’t say.

Both of them now. Wonderful.

Something about the tension shivering in his solar plexus and twitching in his right index finger calls up the sense-memory of old whispering wood and echoes rising into dust-clouded ceilings, holy oil thick and bland on a stole washed too seldom, an old man’s faint cologne and coffee-pungent sweat. _I detest all my sins because I dread the loss of heaven and the pains of hell, but most of all because they offend_ you _, who are all good and deserving of all my love._

Okay, he thinks, lightheaded and nauseous with nerves. Okay.

It’s not anything like easy. It’s also not nearly as hard, in the end, as he expected it would be. Maybe because in all the iterations of this moment he’s ever imagined—and he’s imagined hundreds, almost from the day he and Foggy met—in every fantasy scenario, he’d utterly failed to consider how much Foggy _cares_.

It’s evident in the hitches in Foggy’s breath as Matt tells them haltingly about the devil in the Murdock boys; about his selfish, stupid role in his dad’s death; about the time Stick sprained his fingers to break his dependence on touch; about the years of sitting ignored in the back of the classroom because his teachers didn’t know what to do with the blind kid; about the endless struggle to filter out screams, sirens, secrets. It’s evident in the air quivering around Foggy’s clenched fists as Matt gropes for the words to explain just what and how long it took to find where the lines between _helpless_ and _different, soft_ and _strong_ fell when Stick left him to find boy-soldiers who didn’t need fathers. It’s evident in Foggy’s smell, a sour-salty combination of anger and fear and sorrow and love, love, love beating high hard and steady in the sturdy cavity of his chest.

It’s hope, his senses insist, and it makes Matt tremble like nothing Hell’s Kitchen can throw at him ever has, but he keeps going, laying himself open by degrees. This one thing he will not do by half-measure.

Matt startles when his hands are gripped hard: he was so focused he didn’t even realize Foggy had gotten out of the chair.

“So it is possible to sneak up on you,” Foggy says, and Matt coughs out a wan laugh.

“Uh—yeah. When I’m not paying attention, it is.”

“Good. You’ve just given me a new mission for basically the next five years.”

That sounds like…

“Please,” Matt hears himself say faintly. “Don’t, Foggy. I know I deserve it, but don’t. I can’t take it.”

Foggy’s breath blows stale and hot over his neck. “You are _hopeless_ , Murdock, I swear you are the dumbest vigilante ever to strut around in spandex,” he sighs, and then his hand is in Matt’s hair, tugging their heads together in a coconut-shell-comical clash of foreheads. A callus on Foggy’s middle finger rasps against his scalp just under the base of his skull. It’s possibly the best thing he’s ever felt, until Karen breathes an exasperated “My God, _finally,_ ” and her arms come around them both and she presses her sharp cheekbone into his sore shoulder, and then it’s that, too. They’re surrounding him; he’s drowning in the air dragging in and out of their lungs, the blood humming through their veins and arteries, the concussive language of their hearts slowly tipping toward a mutual rhythm. His own blood is moving too quickly, and he’s sure they can both feel that: how not, then they’re pressed right against him like this? It’s _skinless_. It’s awful and perfect.

“S’not spandex,” he mumbles into Foggy’s shoulder, and rides the staccato wave of Foggy’s silent laughter.

“Hey, I’m not complaining. You want to dress up like _Debbie Does Bondage_ and flex menacingly at the bad guys, believe me you have my vote. But I…I think you’ve known that much for a while, buddy.”

Karen raises her head, tightens her arms as though to keep him and Foggy from moving apart.

“Jesus, Fog.”

“It’s okay. I mean, it pisses me off something fierce, Matthew, as you no doubt already know. But I’m not asking for something you can’t give. I never have, I’m not gonna start now. I just think maybe the three of us need to be all cards on the table from this point onward, so I’m…” The sound of Foggy swallowing is louder than a shout. “…I’m leading by example, I guess. Look at me being all adult about this.”

“I _am_ looking,” Matt breathes, hope burning bright and terrible in his chest, and turns his head just enough to press his mouth to the corner of Foggy’s.

“ _Finally_ ,” Karen says again.

 

* * *

 

Foggy can only hope Stick is going to be questing mystically for most of the night, because this place isn’t exactly soundproof, and he can’t think of a more effective mood-killer than that dried-up old dude narrating this moment with sarcastic commentary.

“Do I want to know what horrors this futon mattress has seen?” Karen says, smiling as she crawls onto it.

Matt, stretched facedown with his arms curved around rumpled blankets, shakes his head into a pillow. “I really don’t think you do.”

“Ignorance is bliss,” Foggy agrees, except it comes out scratchy with want and disbelief, and how could it not with Matt Murdock in jeans and a thin-worn Columbia tee shirt laying there like every dream he tried to forget having? His forearms flex as he grips at the duvet.

They talked about getting some sleep before trying to sort out what to do about the whole Fisk homicidal vendetta thing. Right now Matt may be doing what he does when he feels out of his depth, which is to hang (or in this case lie) back and wait for cues before deciding on an action, or he may in fact have taken the sleep thing at face value. He can be oddly literal for a guy that can hear a lie a mile away.

Foggy has never felt farther from sleep in his life.

Hell with it: if he waits for Matt to master his Catholic schoolboy repression, they’ll be here all night marinating in a stew of dumb lust and residual angst. He suspects Karen might be more proactive—maybe a lot more so, if the calculating glint in her eyes is anything to go by, and isn’t that an intriguing thought—but Franklin Nelson started this insanity and Franklin Nelson will, by god, finish it. Never let it be said he didn’t commit himself fully to folly.

Matt startles when Foggy pulls off one of his socks, his foot twitching away in reflexive circles. “Mnh?” he says, and pushes up onto his elbows when Foggy goes for the other sock. “Agh—Foggy—”

“Relax, Murdock, I’m not after your virtue, I’m just getting the ball rolling. One of us has to. Even if the ball is just rolling toward sleep. Only barbarians nap in their socks, man.”

“Oh.” Matt flattens back into his see-how-relaxed-I-am pose, but his back muscles are tense. “Well then. Which virtues do I need to be, ah, worrying about, exactly?”

Foggy pokes the ball of Matt’s foot with a finger just to see it twitch again. How much more amped than normal is his sense of touch, he wonders, and the question burns a hot little pit into his belly. Karen sets her hand on the back of Matt’s neck, her short fingernails scratching through the fluffy brown hair there. Foggy can feel every scrape echo through Matt all the way down to his curling toes. Karen’s smile turns a little wicked. Foggy grins back at her, nervous and happy. “Abstinence and chastity,” he says, and feels another shiver travel down Matt’s frame. “Though I don’t think those were ever your strong suits anyway, buddy, so, you know. No big loss.”

Matt arches like a cat, all muscle and grace, and then ruins it by heaving a sigh and running his hands through his hair. “I don’t—”

“Matt, just go with it,” Karen says. She encourages this course of action by yanking at his jaw until he’s turned half around and leaning over to kiss him.

Matt makes a surprised noise. One foot kicks up, hilariously. She leans farther in, and Foggy can see the moment Matt gives up on whatever self-flagellating he’s been doing in his head: tension rolls off him like water, and he twists around to cup her head and bite at her lower lip. “Oh, that’s better,” Karen murmurs.

“Are you sure?” Matt asks, thin and strained. “Are you both _sure_?”

“You don’t need to _choose_ , Matt,” Karen says, with that unnervingly precise aim she has. He can see it hit the mark when Matt bites at his own lip. Of course he thought that. Foggy, if he’s being honest, has always thought the same thing: Marci or Matt, Karen or Matt, financial success or Matt, friendship with Matt or something…else. He’d always believed having both was impossible.

Unable to bear another second of being too far away to touch anything but feet, deserving of attention though these particular feet might be, Foggy crawls up the bed. Matt turns, reaches out and grabs him unerringly by the wrist. His gaze hits somewhere around Foggy’s left shoulder, unfocused but intense. “You tell us, Mr. I-Can-Smell-Lies,” Foggy says. “How sure are we?”

Matt’s head tilts a fraction, and then he breathes out in a shaky rush. “You are,” he says. “Thank god.”

“Don’t go bringing him into this, now, I’m knocking off at least a few of the seven deadlies next,” Foggy deadpans, and wins a huff of laughter before Matt tugs him down with inexorable strength.

So this is how he kisses Matt Murdock for the first time: in a creepy ninja library on a futon of extremely questionable provenance while they hide from the henchmen of a psychotic mob boss with a grudge. Foggy has damp patches of sweat at his collar and pits; Matt’s five o’clock shadow could grind down a boulder, and there’s blood drying tackily behind one of his ears. It’s utterly them, he has to admit. It’s a moment he knows will cast a shadow over the rest of his life no matter how this weird and fragile configuration works out. It’s vivid and awkward and revelatory and humbling. It’s _searingly_ hot.

“Fuck,” he breathes—okay, possibly whimpers, Murdock has game, no surprise there— into Matt’s mouth.

“Ngh,” Matt breathes back. “Foggy. Yes. That sounds…good to me.”

Oh. So Matt has…so Matt wants…

“ _Oh_ ,” Foggy says, thinking suddenly of practical considerations with a pang. He didn’t exactly bring condoms and lube to court with him this morning. He doesn’t get farther than picturing a tube of KY rolling out of his briefcase at the beginning of the session before a bony, silky-skinned body intrudes: Karen. Karen who apparently took off her shirt and bra before elbow-dropping between them like a tiny luchadora. Matt makes a muffled sound that starts out high and drops into a groan as he startle-flails into a handful of perfect breast.

“I got tired of waiting my turn,” she announces breathlessly, and then her hand is yanking wonderfully at Foggy’s hair, and he’s licking into her mint-tasting mouth with a happy hum. It has none of the fraughtness of kissing Matt, and none of his schoolboy crush from last year: it feels steady and joyous, like coming home after a long day. If home were smooth-skinned and strong and super-hot with wickedly clever fingers, that is.

He fumbles with the hand not holding him up and gets a squeezable palmful of ass: Matt makes a noise of pleased surprise. Karen arches, pressing her chest into his and her pelvis back into Matt’s. Her fingernails slide under Foggy’s collar.

“Lose the shirt, Nelson.”

“Just the shirt, eh?” Foggy pants, trying for cool and falling far short. “As you wish, Ms. Page.”

“Ugh. Don’t quote _The Princess Bride_ at me, I used to watch that with my gramma. Here—lift up—”

He likes to think he manages to avoid losing more than one button in the process of Karen yanking his shirt off him like a heroine in a bodice-ripper, but he is neither terribly sure nor terribly interested. Matt is pressed flush up against Karen’s back, head bowed to the knobby curve where her spine juts out above her shoulder blades, and he is breathing slow and careful, one hand idly toying with the buckle of Foggy’s belt.

“Well,” Foggy says, trying hard to retain the thread of the conversation. “One of us here did boogie around Hell’s Kitchen looking like the Dread Pirate Roberts for a while, so.”

Matt snorts and pokes him in the stomach. Karen laughs and her knee goes somewhere delicate and presses lightly. It’s maddening. Foggy bends to lick and bite at the warm little stone of her nipple and Matt leans up to swallow her moan. This is rapidly turning into the sort of situation where the suddenly-recalled absence of prophylactics will cause maximum heartache. He can’t stop, though; he can barely slow down. “Christ,” he groans, and Matt frowns. “Sorry, Matt. Sorry, baby Jesus. But, guys! _Condoms._ Slippery-but-hygienic substances that come in clean packages, because I know it’s sexy on TV and all, but trust me olive oil is not the greatest—”

“I don’t think you and I watch the same cooking shows, Nelson,” Karen muses, looking delighted and a little appalled.

“If you can still say _hygienic substances_ , then I’m clearly doing something wrong,” Matt says. He pushes up on his wrists and toes—and what a view that is—to rise over the curve of Karen’s side. He braces on his knees above them and pulls his tee off by grabbing the collar in the back and yanking, bending into a perfect curve of muscle and pale scarred skin for a moment as he tugs it over his head. Foggy can hear Karen’s breathing halt. He sympathizes completely. Matt must be getting an epic drum duo from their chests right now. His hair is hilarious: it looks like it’s trying to stage a mass exodus from his scalp. “We’ll manage, Foggy,” Matt says. “Unless you want to try to sleep now.”

“My purse. On the dresser.” Karen drags a hand down Matt’s chest, grins when he draws a sharp breath. She hooks fingers into the waistband of his jeans. “Inside zipper.”

For a moment Foggy can only stare. Then he can only stare some more, because she is gold and cream and ferocity with a razor-sharp quirk of a smile, and her breasts really are perfect, and she is prepared like the sexiest motherfucking girl scout in the troop. “You—seriously?—okay, I know this is like the worst timing ever but I just have to know if you went out and got all that after you talked to Ginormous Pole yesterday, because that is a little—” He gets both Matt’s and Karen’s fingers poking his ribs for this, and shrieks like a girl. “Aahagh, _stop_ —For real though! If that is how your brain works, Page, I need to know this _right now_.”

“It totally, totally is,” Karen says with a grin.

“ _Evil_ ,” he gasps, and heaves himself to his feet to find Karen’s purse and toss it to her. “Also, kudos, because that? Is more than a little disturbing.”

Matt snatches the purse out of the air with an economic and perfectly accurate gesture; also without turning his head to track it. He drops it next to her. Foggy can see Karen registering this, turning it over: he has a pretty good idea what she’s thinking, as he’s been there. “Don’t worry. We can take turns pitching stuff at him later.”

“Do I get a say in this?” Matt grumbles, but the line of his mouth is turning upward. His chest rises and falls, still even, but deep. There’s a faint pink flush spreading from his chest to his jawline and it’s lovely. Foggy wishes Matt could see it.

“Nope, no vote for you, Murdock. This is what you get for having a secret identity. Pitching will happen.”

“Will it,” Matt says, his voice going all vigilante-in-a-dark-alley. Foggy’s not sure what this does to his heartrate, because he’s suddenly too busy trying not to fall on his face, but whatever it is it makes Matt’s eyebrows rise and his mouth stretch in a smile. “Please refer to Exhibit A, Counselor,” he murmurs, and grabs Foggy by the belt to reel him in.

On the mattress Karen is shimmying out of her skirt, her eyes huge and brilliant.

“Shut up with your fancy lawyer talk, Murdock,” Foggy rasps, and bites gently at the underside of Matt’s prickly jaw, getting a happy double handful of skin and dragging his fingernails over Matt’s spectacular shoulders, down his sides. Matt makes a noise in the back of his throat and cards his fingers into Foggy’s hair. He gives Foggy a good case of beard burn and weak knees, but his hands are growing clumsy and his breath is coming quicker when Foggy licks his way up to Matt’s mouth. Foggy doesn’t believe he will ever in his life see anything hotter than Matt Murdock slowly coming unstrung in his hands.

“Too much?” he asks, and Matt heaves a shuddery sigh, pressing his face into Foggy’s neck.

“Overwhelming,” he murmurs. “Touch is…the hardest to filter. It’s not bad, though. Just hard—hard to concentrate enough.”

Foggy shakes at him. “Well then stop filtering, you idiot. You don’t need to—at least, if I understand how this works for you, and sure, maybe I can’t, I don’t think you do. There isn’t anybody here who doesn’t already know what you can do, Matt. You don’t need to hide it.”

Matt’s face does something squinchy against his neck. For a second Electra’s ghost haunts the knotted lines of him, the clenching of his hand on Foggy’s hip. Then Karen’s arms snake around from behind, one curving around Matt’s stomach, one stretching to press against Foggy’s back. She utters a heroic, winning-the-deadlift-championship yell and _hauls_ , and improbably, considering she is maybe a hundred and fifteen soaking wet, all three of them tip sideways onto the futon mattress, which issues a tired puff of dust and an ominous creak. Karen, who inevitably ended up at the bottom of the pile, coughs.

Matt’s alarmed expression is leveled up exponentially by his crazy hair. Foggy starts laughing and can’t stop. “You _are_ a luchadora, Page! Crap, I’m the only one without a secret identity here.”

Then, as she shoves and tugs her way out from under them, he realizes she’s naked, and suddenly he’s not laughing. Matt gets there about the same time he does. “Mmn,” he whispers, and rolls to press his face into her stomach. Karen squeaks. “ _Oh_. Karen. Can I.”

“Twist my arm,” Karen groans, and Matt slides down until he can get his tongue on her. Karen arches up with a gasp, tugs at Foggy’s hair until he bends down to kiss her open mouth. She’s writhing, her skin flushing from cheekbones to chest as Foggy sucks a nipple into his mouth and scrapes teeth along it. She cries out. Then her hand is slapping at his forearm, and even in the middle of what Matt’s doing to her, which sounds _amazing_ , she drags his hand sideways to a cool plastic tube and a pair of crinkly flat squares of tinfoil.

“You are a _genius_ ,” he murmurs fervently into her hot skin.

“I know. Oh—Matt—oh _there_ —”

The lube’s not KY, thankfully, or he’d be in danger of falling to a giggling fit of epic proportions. Foggy uncaps it, struggles for a moment with the stupid tinfoil seal, and sits up, feeling suddenly breathless. “Matt?” he says, and Matt raises his head from between Karen’s thighs long enough to growl out an emphatic agreement and stretch out some more in clear invitation.

It’s been a while since he was with a guy; not since the last time he and Marci broke up in grad school. Foggy crawls down to where Matt’s sprawled and slips a hand under one prominent hipbone to fumble Matt’s belt undone, then his buttons and zipper. “Your fancy lawyer pants would be a lot easier,” he grumbles, and Matt huffs a startled laugh, which drags a birdlike, fluttery noise out of Karen’s throat. She’s twisting slowly, a blush high on her cheekbones and throat, her hair spread in mermaid-esque tangles all around her head. The tendons in her neck and her arms stand out. She’s one of the most beautiful things Foggy’s ever seen.

The other most beautiful thing raises his hips up so Foggy can drag his jeans and boxer briefs down the length of his ridiculously defined legs.

Matt’s ass is worthy of song. Foggy expresses this sentiment, and Matt’s shoulders shake. He turns his head into the shiny crease of Karen’s thigh. “Foggy, stop making me laugh, I can’t—”

“Oh no no, _please_ make him laugh,” Karen chirps, and nudges the side of Matt’s face with the inside of her long leg. Matt groans and gets back to work.

“I live to serve,” Foggy says agreeably, and hides the way his hands have started to tremble by dragging the condoms close. The line of Matt’s back is tenser: not hesitation, Foggy hopes. He hopes it’s something like what he’s feeling, something which makes his hands shake and his heart beat up in his throat. “Hello,” he murmurs, and kisses a trail down the lumbar curve of Matt’s spine. He smooths his palms reverently over the curves of that amazing ass and squeezes. Matt twitches. There’s a light sheen of sweat beading on his skin at the dip where his back ends. Karen moans higher, her breath starting to hitch gorgeously, and Foggy bends to bite at one muscular cheek, because what the hell. You only live once.

Matt arches and yelps; Karen arches and yelps. “Sex noises in stereo!” Foggy declares, though his voice is starting to get shaky too now, and hears Matt’s classic happy-drunk giggle, muffled in Karen. “Okay, now—?”

“ _Yes_ , Foggy, get on with it.” Matt’s still snickering.

The lube is cold: he rubs it between his fingers before getting to work, slow and gentle, not sure how much of this Matt’s done. It’s like the first time he won a case by himself. It’s like the first time his mother told him he was the best of her and his dad. It’s like the first time Matt trusted him enough to grip his arm as they crossed campus, the first time Karen tucked his wayward hair behind his ear while he was nodding over client files: like the strange-not-strange thrill he’d felt when she asked him to feel her face. It’s a secret, mouthed into the scars over Matt’s ribs as he rubs and presses at that tight ring of muscle, rubs and presses and slides in two knuckles deep, careful and slow, and Matt clutches at the sheets, and Karen hisses through her clenched teeth and curves up in a shining arc toward climax.

She slides, still panting, under Matt until his face is pressed into her stomach—impressive recovery time, Page, Foggy thinks but doesn’t say, because he is occupied with the clench around his two fingers, the careful, slow stretch. Matt makes a soft noise and flails a hand out; Karen catches it and weaves their fingers together. “How,” he says, voice gravelly. “Do you want to do this.”

“Still need to work on the interrogative tone, buddy,” Foggy murmurs, curling his fingers slowly, searching.

“I’ll interrogate at you as much as you want, Foggy, just—oh, oh, oh my _god_ —”

Matt’s irritated tone climbs into fractured astonishment. He arches. “Do that again,” he pants, and whines high and stuttering and slaps the mattress with a palm when Foggy obliges.

“Motion sustained,” Foggy says. Karen snorts laughter, shakes her head. Matt grins over his shoulder like Foggy’s only ever seen him grin when high or completely blitzed on whiskey, wide and happy.

Foggy tosses Karen one of the condoms and licks a stripe up Matt’s spine. Three fingers, almost enough—he rests his forehead against Matt’s heaving ribcage. Karen pokes Matt in the shoulder. “Budge up, Murdock,” she says huskily. “Give me room to work here.”

“Wh—ah? Yeah.” It would be comical, how quickly Matt pushes himself up on his palms, but it’s all grace and strength, and there’s nothing funny about it. Foggy’s got his ear pressed to Matt’s skin, and his senses are occupied with the deep rasp of air filling and leaving Matt’s lungs, the rabbit-quick pounding of his heart against the cavern of his torso. Is this what it’s like for Matt all the time? God, how does he not walk around with a permanent boner?

He bites at the spot just under Matt’s shoulder blade and laves the red mark with his tongue, and Matt bows his head, breathing hard through his nose. Karen wiggles under Matt, palms him: Foggy can’t see it, but it seems evident by Matt’s uneven groan, the involuntary thrust of his hips and tremble in his arms. Matt presses downward to catch her mouth in a kiss. He reaches back with one hand and catches Foggy briefly by the elbow, a weird, shivery-aching echo of every time Matt’s gripped Foggy there for guidance, or a good cover, or maybe something else. Starting to come a bit unstrung himself, Foggy leans back to grab the lube and the second condom.

“Come in, Matt,” Karen says. Matt does, with a smooth forward motion and a small sigh. Foggy spends a moment too long just watching, astonished by the fact that nobody but him gets to see this, how bright,  how beautiful they are.

“You two are gonna kill me,” he says, throat aching. It’s almost too much. He does his own deep breathing, thinks of family law statutes while he rolls the condom on.

“You—you—” Matt pants. “Have no—idea. _Augh_. Come _on_ , Foggy.”

So this is how he fucks Matt Murdock for the first time: he does it trembling head to toe and halfway there before he is even inside, and he already knows, he _knows_ it’s not going to be the only time. He does it with Karen undulating under them both and moaning and ordering them to move, goddammit _move_ ; with one of her hands reaching up to clutch his shoulder and her left leg flung over both their hips so that Foggy can grip her slender calf and lick a stripe over her ankle. With Matt writhing beneath him and laughing and gasping words that might be prayer or profanity. “Oh please,” Matt moans, blazingly gorgeous as he unravels, “Karen—Fog—oh god oh _please_ ,” and Foggy never forgets to be careful, because it’s his heart in two puzzle-pieces beneath him, he knows this now.

“ _Matty_ ,” he gasps, and Matt goes rigid and then shouts. One of his arms buckles. Karen bucks up and groans. Foggy follows right on her heels, his eyes squeezed shut, lost in them, in the sounds and smells and sensations of them, in the hot sweet clench of Matt’s body and the way their quick breaths push at his chest.

For a moment he’s not sure he can withdraw, his legs are shaking so badly. But Matt’s other arm buckles, and Foggy can feel the tremor in his legs: he slides out as slowly as he can manage before Matt collapses, panting.

“Oof,” Karen grunts.

“Sorry.”

“No, sweetheart, you stay right here, just lemme—” she utters another luchadora-type noise and hauls herself partially out from under Matt, who makes vague flailing motions like he wants to help but hasn’t figured out how to move his arms and legs. Foggy aims himself toward Matt’s side and tips over, feeling like every organ is having its own tiny seizure inside his body.

“I think I may have had a stroke,” Foggy groans.

“No you didn’t,” Matt mumbles into Karen’s elbow, frowning. “They sound like—no. You’re fine.” He breathes loudly a few times and nuzzles his forehead into the crease of Karen’s arm, reaches to push a palm over Foggy’s cheek. The gestures are clumsy and fragile-looking, which Foggy supposes makes sense: Matt has never let go easily or often, and this has been a bit of a banner day. There’s sweat stiffening his hair at the temples and crown, bitemarks reddening over his neck and shoulders, and his eyebrows keep crashing together and then smoothing out again, as though tapping out his thoughts in Morse Code. He looks wrecked and halfway to sleep. “You’re fine,” he sighs.

“I think we’re all a few thousand yards past _fine,_ ” Karen says, poking Foggy in the chest. “Though my legs are going kind of numb at the moment. The guy whose idea of a workout is parkouring all over Hell’s Kitchen pounding muggers and mobsters with his fists should probably be the one on the bottom of this pigpile, yeah? You’re made of solid oak, Matt, seriously.”

Matt hums vaguely and leans up on an elbow so that Karen can clamber out from underneath him: she knees Foggy in the belly and then flops artlessly atop both of them, making a contented sort of grunt. “Much better. Boy pillows: my favorite.”

“ _Boys_ ,” Matt mutters, disgruntled.

“My boys.”

“I can get behind that one,” Foggy sighs, too content to shift out of the way of Karen’s sharp elbows.

 “I’m pretty sure you just did,” Matt says, and presses his grin into Foggy’s shoulder when Foggy snickers.

“A Murdock joke, it must be the end of the world. C’mon, man, slide over so Karen can get her bony joints out of my soft parts. Please tell me that sheet’s still in one piece, because I am sleeping here one way or the other, but I’d much rather do it with some assurance that Mr. Miyagi isn’t going to come back and stare at my ass.”

Matt’s head lifts: he makes a face like he has a mouthful of expired yogurt. “Igh?” he says, and hauls the sheet up violently. “Thanks, Fog.”

“I’m pretty sure he’s blind, Foggy,” Karen mutters.

“Even worse. He can _hear_ my ass,” Foggy says sincerely. It takes him a second to understand what he just said when Karen covers her face with her hand and Matt presses his hard into a pillow. “Wait, no, I didn’t—oh fuck it. Who knows, maybe that would shut him up.”

Now they’re both laughing so hard the mattress is shaking. “Cranky stick,” Matt wheezes into the pillow. “Grabbed the—the wrong end of the—oh, god, I missed you guys so much.”

There’s a lot he could say to that.

Foggy turns a few choice options over while they shift around and generally burrow in like groundhogs. He can feel Matt beginning to tense up on Karen’s other side, no doubt listing all of Foggy’s options in his head only with more guilt, and he fumbles until he meets one of those fantastic biceps and pats it.

“Missed you too,” Foggy says. “Now shut the hell up and sleep, Murdock, we’ve got work to do in the morning.”

 

* * *

 

At first he doesn’t know what wakes him: he’s smothered in skin, lilac-smelling hair, citrus-smelling soap, chalky deodorant and sweat and sex and dust and grease and old blood and stale sleep-breath. The tidal roar of breath from two sets of lungs and the resting beat of two hearts. Foggy and Karen. They—good God. He sits up carefully, wide awake, brushes Karen’s hair out of his mouth and gently disentangles  Foggy’s leg from his.

“Finally got your head straight?” comes Stick’s voice from just outside the door: he is weary and carrying more bruises that slosh and throb just beneath the thin layer of his skin, and somebody else’s blood is drying on his clothing. He’s carrying Thai food.

“Stick?” Matt whispers.

Stick doesn’t have his senses, but there’s no way he will have missed where Matt is or what they did in here. He can’t even manage to be embarrassed about it. There’s a warm knot in his chest and his head is fuzzy with endorphins and exhaustion. Karen snuffles and turns closer to Foggy. Their pulses are almost synchronous.

It’s maybe the best thing he’s ever heard.

There’s a huff from outside the door; the oil-on-paper sound of Stick smiling. “I said stay down, Matty, but damn.”

“Why? Why, Stick?”

“Keep low for another day: by then I should have something solid, and we can kick some skulls in.”

Foggy twitches, sighs, and curls around Karen. Matt thinks his chest might actually crack open. “ _Stick,_ ” he hisses.

A rustle of clothes, tendons, skin, the knee that he knows sometimes bothers Stick: it feels swollen tonight. The Thai food cartons slap to the floorboards outside the door. The old man sighs.

“You said it was worth it,” he says with a faint note of belligerence. “I took you at your word. Get some rest, kid.”

For a second he’s rendered completely mute by surprise. “Wait—what? Stick. _Stick_ ,” he whispers, but he can hear Stick moving away now, limping slightly as he removes his sword from inside his coat and passes a soft cloth over it.

“Hmnh?” Karen groans, and fumbles until the back of her hand hits his cheek. “Matt? Y’kay?”

“Yeah, Karen,” Matt says, sliding back down to curl against her warm curves, stretch his arm out and brush Foggy’s slightly warmer skin. They are a mosaic of heat and life. Pressed this close, steeped in each other, it’s hard to tell where any one of them begins or ends. “Yeah, I’m okay. Go to sleep.”

She wiggles deeper into the mattress and hums approval. Matt lets his muscles relax group by group and breathes in the new scent the three of them make.

He’ll worry about it in the morning.


End file.
